The Whitman era has already begun! And while she’s at HP’s helm for only a day, we can already see what she’s planning to do with the company. And that is, to follow the previous decision of Apotheker and HP boards to thrash away WebOS for good and spin-off its PC business to purchase a UK-based software company — Autonomy — for $10.3 billion.
Obviously, we don’t have a crystal ball here to predict exactly what will happen to the company, in the next year or so. But one thing is for certain, it doesn’t look good. In fact, we believe HP may become Yahoo if its captain won’t be able to navigate the ship on the proper course.
If you’ll remember Yahoo on 2008, it was about to be acquired by Microsoft for some dividend of shares; however, its co-founder and current CEO Jerry Yang feels its a little too less and try to bargain for more. Naturally, MS refused. The result? Yahoo’s investors didn’t like it and just a couple of days after that, Yahoo stocks have plummeted like a falling rocketship in the sky – and no one can stop it — not even by Yang who resigned and was taken over by Carol Bartz a few weeks later.
Likewise, we all know how Bartz ended up. And with just a year acting as CEO of the ailing company, she was fired by the boards. Now, Yahoo’s two main options is to cut of its services and sell it on interested buyers like pizza slices or sell it as a whole like what they should’ve done four years ago – but this time – its stock value is quadruple times lower.
Going back at HP, while it’s considered a consumer-electronic industry, the way how the company is facing its demons is starting to look like Yahoo last 2008. Just try to think about Apotheker as Yang who failed to understand the value of WebOS and its PC business and starts to sell it like hotcakes. After he resigned, Whitman takes over and just like Bartz – she can’t do anything to save the dying ship since the enemy bombarded it with many cannonballs already.
Moments before the media announced Whitman to be the CEO of HP, we’re hoping that she’ll be able to create the right decision by trying to save WebOS. You see, eventhough the system is not perfect and still flawed, it’s only one of the few mobile OS we’ve seen which has a good future, if nurtured, wayforward battling with Android or iOS. Its firesale is just one of the many proof how many people are still interested to buy WebOS devices if given the right price. However, it appears our CEO didn’t realize this and she’s too busy trying to win her employees and the company’s board stating “everything will be fine” as soon as they manage to finished the previous decision of Apotheker.
The real problem? Unlike Mark Hurd, Leo Apotheker is not an engineer. He doesn’t contain the vision to create revolutionary devices. And that’s why his interest is to move these things away. I’m not blaming the guy, but I always see HP as a company meant to create hardware and computers – and if they only have a CEO who understands how to “revolutionize” it — like the way how Hurd saved the company during his era. I believe HP will survive.
But as you can see from the turnaround of events, it appears the reality is far away from this. As I end this column, lets just pray HP won’t end up like Yahoo in the few years ahead. And oh, for Meg Whitman, lets hope she doesn’t drop the “F word” like our former Yahoo CEO likes to do when facing the hotseat from the media.
You might also like
Tags: hp yahoo, meg whitman, meg whitman as carol bartz, meg whitman ceo, meg whitman hp ceo
